SURREY County Council paid almost £1.5m for land surrounding Charlton Lane in Shepperton, raising questions about the application for an eco park at the site which was submitted earlier this year.

A Freedom of Information request revealed that the county council (SCC) paid £1,130,000 and a further £45,200 in stamp duty land taxation for approximately 25 acres of green belt land to the north east of the existing Charlton Lane Community Recycling Centre.

Campaigners against the batch oxidisation gasification plant (a process that heats waste to power electricity) and anaerobic digestion system have argued that it means the council expected the planning application to be approved, despite strong objections from Spelthorne Borough Council and local residents.

Adrian Corti, a member of the Spelthorne Against the Eco Park group, who lives in Charlton Village, said: “The longer you dig into it, the more suspicious things become.

“SCC must have been very confident in it being passed for them to fork out that amount of money in hard times. They must have thought it would be passed. This is valuable green belt land.

“It seems they have pre-empted the decision yet again. It is an awful lot of money for them to invest. They wouldn’t have spent that much if they didn’t think the application would be passed.”

An application by SITA on behalf of SCC to build an eco park was approved on June 30 this year. The approval for the land purchase was given in April 2009 at a county council meeting. The eco park will deal with 40,000 tonnes of food waste and 60,000 tonnes of household rubbish each year. The application was submitted to SCC by SITA, which is contracted by the council to deal with the county's waste.

An appeal against the approval has already been submitted to Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, with a decision expected imminently.

An SCC spokesman said: “The eco park development at Charlton Lane in Shepperton will help us towards achieving our aim of eliminating the use of landfill, which costs Surrey taxpayers £600,000 every month in taxes alone and is damaging to the environment.